The summer passed uneventfully at the Circle of Peloresow. There were no official summer holidays at the Circle, so the subject circles continued meeting and the laboratory, gardens, observatory, and library were abuzz with activity at all hours of the day and night, just like during the traditional school term. But while there was no official summer recess, there was also no rule requiring that the girls attend their lessons. Most of them flitted in and out throughout the summer, skipping circle meetings to take a holiday or focus on their research as they saw fit.
Luna withdrew to the solitude of the Rook, only occasionally returning to the Circle to attend meetings or consult a book in the library. She preferred to be away from probing eyes and questions. Much as she loved the Circle, the longer she stayed there, the more persistent the inevitable requests for prophecies became.
Prophecy was the core of who Luna was, why she was, but lately it felt like a curse, a homing beacon, an invitation to invade her mind. Sometimes Luna could feel the tension of an approaching prophecy like the change in air pressure heralding a summer storm. But she had left her runestones back at the Circle, and it had not been an accident. Now when she felt the pull of a prophecy like an itch she longed to scratch, she went to lie down in her darkened old bedroom and waited for the feeling to pass.
Luna was haunted by the way Cornelius Fudge had looked at her during the Ministry hearing, like he knew her prophecy as intimately as if he had seen it himself in his own cup of morning tea. Each prophecy she felt buzzing round her head and rustling in her bones was an opportunity, a possible glimpse of the future. It was also a threat, for anything she saw, Fudge could see, too.
Luna knew better than to tell her mother about what had happened at the hearing; she knew Cressida would only panic. She still remembered the way her mother had gripped her wrist and warned her off trusting others, even her friends, even her own mother. Allowing others to see her doubts could tarnish her friends' respect for her and her reputation as the raven queen. Luna resented the lesson, but she had learned it just the same. Sometimes it was necessary to lie to mask what she did not understand. Until she understood it, she could not control it.
No, she couldn't tell Professor McGonagall or Mrs. Brown, or even Ginny and Lavender. She might have told her father, but he was still on his pilgrimage in Europe and she daren't commit such a thing to parchment, which could be intercepted just as easily as her prophecies. Besides, it had been weeks since she had heard from Xenophilius. She fancied he was too busy with his research to answer his daughter's letters. That was what she said with mock scorn to the other girls when they asked about him. It was easier to feel the exasperation and resentment than to risk striking the tangled nerve of worry buried just below the surface.
In reality, Luna felt her father's absence like a physical ache. So she spent most of her time haunting the house where he had raised her and where, for the last few years, he had lived alone. The Lovegood house had always borne the marks of its owners' eccentricities, but it had fallen into even greater disrepair with only one inattentive occupant instead of three. Xenophilius had constant companions in the dust puffskeins that formed on the unswept floors, and a harmonious symphony above his head on rainy days from the leaks in the roof. Without Cressida and Luna to help, he had only planted a few small vegetable beds and let the rest of the garden grow wild. The compost heap stunk slightly and was in desperate need of more frequent turning.
But Luna still felt traces of him, and she clung to these through her long, lonely summer. She found notes in his crabbed script tucked all over the house, she took to typing up her research notes on his old typewriter, and she still spent hours trying to decipher the odd way he arranged his books. Most of all, she had the galaxy he had made for her. Luna's bedroom walls were still adorned with his enchantments, celestial bodies charmed to glow and orbit his daughter, the center of his universe. When she felt overwhelmed with prophecies demanding to be Seen, she liked to lie on her narrow bed and look at her father's stars and planets, which he had lovingly but rather pointlessly inscribed with their obscure Latin and Greek names when she was born. To this day, she still struggled to pronounce some of them.
She hardly thought of her mother the entire summer, which of course meant that she was thinking of her almost constantly. With Xenophilius looming so large in her mind, Cressida was the natural contrast, the negative space surrounding the silhouette of her husband, ever present in her very absence.
Luna was not shocked when her mother appeared in the Rook's library one day, although she couldn't say the last time she had seen her or the last time Cressida had been to the Rook.
"Hi, Mum," she said barely looking up from her book, which was perched precariously on the edge of the desk so she could read it while typing on her father's typewriter.
"How are you doing, love?" Cressida put the back of her hand against her daughter's forehead as if to feel for a fever.
"Mum, stop! It's not like I'm sick," Luna pulled away.
"We've been worried about you, all cooped up here by yourself."
Luna grunted and hunched over her book, pretending to read.
"Listen, a few of us have been organizing this protest in London. It's tomorrow, and we thought you might like to come."
"What are you protesting this time? Wand rights for trolls?" Luna snorted.
"Love, you can't run from this forever. You're going to have to confront it eventually."
"I don't want to talk about it, okay?" Luna turned a page even though she was barely skimming the words.
"That's perfectly natural! You don't have to talk about it. But Ginny and Lavender are actually finding that turning their feelings into action is really helping them cope."
"What even is there to protest? People died, it's all very sad, you can't change it." Luna finally gave up staring at her book and whirled to face her mother. Cressida was being so calm and soothing that it was maddening.
"Luna, you were there. 23 people died! How can you not care about this?"
"Yeah, and you weren't there, so maybe you should just drop it. 23 people died but there's no bringing them back. What's the point?" If she was honest with herself, Luna did not like talking about the massacre at the Triwizard Tournament because she hardly thought about it anymore. In fact, she could barely remember it. Luna still had vivid nightmares about the ash and smoke of the Quidditch World Cup, but when she thought of the 24th of June, she mostly remembered screams and a few flashes of green light. The experience had seemingly skittered on the surface of her consciousness without leaving a trace, like leaves swept away on the wind. Ginny reckoned their brains must have blocked out the memories because they'd be completely unable to function from the trauma of two catastrophes in a single year.
"23 people died on the Ministry's watch. Not only that, but he somehow escaped from Azkaban! I want to know how it happened."
"Why does it matter how it happened? The nutcase got what he deserved, anyway." Luna's lips curled around the word "nutcase," relishing the thrill of bitterness it stoked in her. It was a particularly dirty word in the Lovegood family, and she knew her mother had long been the target of such taunts. As had Luna herself, of course, but in her mind that only sharpened the sting of the jab.
"Without a trial!" Cressida's cheeks flushed but she did not take the bait.
"So?"
"Don't you think that means they're hiding something? And besides, the Dementor's Kiss? That's cruel and unusual punishment under about 15 Ministry statutes. Why have they broken their own laws?" Cressida's voice finally cracked and her fingers knotted and unknotted themselves as she struggled to make her daughter see what was so clear to her. Luna only smirked, pleased with herself for breaking her mother's infuriating composure. But that wasn't enough for her to be fully satisfied. Luna kept pushing, picking at the scab.
"So you don't think someone who goes mad, escapes from Azkaban, disguises himself as a famous Auror, infiltrates Hogwarts and kills 23 people deserves whatever he has coming to him?"
"Not without a trial, no I don't. And in fact, I don't believe that anyone deserves to be subjected to the Dementor's Kiss. Come now, Luna, now you're just being contrary. I thought your father and I taught you better than this."
"Yeah, well speaking of Dad…"Luna was about to ask her mother why she didn't spend more time worrying about her missing husband's whereabouts instead of defending Barty Crouch, Jr. But the cruelty of the thought thundered through her veins and struck her dumb like lightning. Luna took several deep breaths and tried to remember why she was being so monstrously rude about being invited to a protest. She had tagged along to her parents' protests since infancy, and it was a perfectly reasonable assumption to think she might like to attend this one. Cressida was right; she was only picking a fight because it was familiar, reassuring in an odd way. It wouldn't make her father any safer, nor make the owl carrying his next letter fly any faster.
"You think Daddy would protest?'
"You don't?"
"You're right. Of course he would. I'm sorry." Luna took a deep shuddering breath and shut her book.
"It's alright, love." Cressida cradled her daughter's head and stroked her hair, and Luna let her.
The throng of people clogged Diagon Alley as far as the eye could see, almost to the horizon. At first Luna assumed they must have stumbled upon a parade or people queuing for a sale at Slug and Jiggers apothecary. But then she noticed that they were all facing in the direction of the Diagon Alley entrance to the Ministry of Magic, and many of them were holding signs.
"Is this the protest?"
"Dur! What else would it be?" Padma asked, pulling a face like Luna was playing dumb or making a joke.
"But...there's people other than us here. Lots of them!" Luna was expecting the Circle members plus a ragtag band of eccentrics. They would chant for a few hours and dodge jeers and kicks from passersby before retiring to the Leaky Cauldron for a pint and commiseration about their next equally ineffective strike or boycott or sit in. That's how her parents' protests had gone since time immemorial.
"Of course there are! Hundreds of people have written to us, proper riled up. You really have been living under a rock at the Rook, huh?" Ginny asked.
"Really? So how did you organize all this?" These people didn't look like the usual activist crowd who could be lured to any protest with the promise of an eager audience for their conspiracy theories. These were ordinary people, not a Hallows pendant in sight, nor a whiff of tofu. Many of them were looking about self-consciously, shuffling their feet and hiding behind their signs. Classic first time protestors. There were usually a few at every protest, but Luna had never seen this many before. Some wore hoods and masks, out of embarrassment or a genuine desire to shield their identity she could not guess.
"Well, you can tell your dad thanks for nothing. With the Quibbler not publishing anything while he's gone, it's been harder than it ought to be. Someone started putting these weird advertisements in the Daily Prophet, and we realized they were a sort of code. There's been a whole elaborate system of codes, sending letters to fake addresses so we can't be tracked, planning this whole thing."
"But...Mum, your protests were never like this." Cressida did not look offended. She merely shook her head. Her eyes looked even glassier than usual, and Luna knew she was thinking of Xenophilius. They had never tried to hide their identities before, in fact had seemed to revel in the publicity of it all, daring the Ministry to retaliate.
"So much has changed since the old days. Things feel more dangerous now. Or maybe things were dangerous then, and we were just young and naive." Luna shifted to move closer to her mother.
More and more people trickled into the narrow cobblestone street. There was Madam Bones, the hood of her cloak hanging low over her brow. Mr. and Mrs. Weasley were also there, along with Padma, Parvati, Rania, Lavender, Mrs. Brown, and even Mrs. Figg and Caroline. Many of them carried the same distinct masks in the shapes of owls: a proud beak flanked by feathery wings on each side.
"What's with the masks?" Luna wondered if she had made some kind of faux pas for neglecting to bring one, "Is this part fancy dress party, part protest?"
"Never you mind. A few of us volunteered to help marshal everyone, lead the chants and so on. The organizer thought it would be a good idea to have matching masks so everyone knows we're the organizers, but we don't have to reveal who we are," Lavender said this while slipping her own mask over her face. Her voice was muffled and the peep holes did not quite align with her eyes, rendering an uncanny effect.
"Who is this organizer anyway?"
"Nobody knows. It's safer for them to stay anonymous, of course, even more important than for us, really. They'll be the one in the dragon mask." Ginny was scanning the crowd, no doubt for any sign of shining scales or glinting teeth.
"It's nearly time, off we pop!" Cressida had put her owl mask on without Luna's noticing, and she nearly cried out, thinking a stranger had infiltrated their tight-knit circle and taken her mother's place.
"You too?! If I had known you were all going to ditch me…"
"Hush, and just stay near the Weasleys and Mrs. Figg. We'll be back soon," her mother blew air kisses at her before disappearing into the crowd with the others.
People in owl masks seemed to materialize every few feet, ushering the protestors into more orderly lines, leading shorter people towards the front, summoning chairs and stools for the elderly and infirm, making sure there were clear paths in several directions. At the front of the crowd they stacked several crates on top of one another.
Immediately after these small tasks were finished, a stocky figure in a brilliant jade green dragon mask appeared and took their place on the makeshift stage. Luna could not tell whether they were a man or a woman, and got the distinct impression that they had dressed in several thick layers to disguise their frame. In any case, they were certainly too short to be Xenophilius. Luna had not realized she was hoping the organizer was her father until she felt a twinge of disappointment.
The organizer held a small golden microphone to their mouth and began speaking.
"On the 24th of June, 23 people were killed at the final task of the Triwizard Tournament. We do not know how or why. We have been told that Barty Crouch, Jr. went on a mad killing spree. But the Ministry of Magic has provided no proof of this, no answers." The microphone was enchanted to distort the speaker's voice into an eerie imitation of human speech. The tone was unnaturally deep, warped with occasional high-pitched warbles.
"There has been no Ministry inquiry into the incident. Barty Crouch has apparently been subjected to the Dementor's Kiss without trial and returned to Azkaban, but again, no proof of this has been provided. Journalists have not been allowed to enter Azkaban since the incident, and the Minister for Magic has refused all questions from journalists and concerned citizens alike."
The speaker paused, but the crowd had stilled to a tense silence. They knew that this was merely the prologue, the opening notes establishing a cadence that would soon be disrupted in the frenzied crescendo that was to come.
"And more has been lost than lives! Our trust in our government has been eroded, perhaps irreparably. Cornelius Fudge has proved again and again that he does not deserve the trust of the British magical public! The extrajudicial execution of Barty Crouch, Jr. only proves that he is not fit for office! We demand a full inquiry into the circumstances of Crouch's escape from Azkaban, the attack and imprisonment of Alastor Moody, the events on the 24th of June, and the decision to execute Crouch via Dementor's kiss without a trial."
The organizer paused to take a short breath and made to speak again, but the crowd rushed to fill even that brief silence. They rumbled and stamped their feet. The organizer apparently had not planned for this reaction to come so early in the speech. Luna heard several owls nearby shushing the crowd, and the organizer raised their hands and waited for the crowd to quiet before they could continue.
"Those of us who have lost loved ones have not been given answers. Those of us who were there at the Triwizard Tournament have not been given closure. Those of us concerned with the integrity of our democracy have not been given reassurance. We grieve alone. We worry alone. We doubt alone. And that is what the Ministry wants. They do not want us to come together, because they know that where alone we are weak, together we are strong!"
The crescendo had come, and the crowd was ready to meet it with shouts, cries, sobs, and jeers. Luna could hardly see the blue of the sky through the forest of signs hoisted high in the air.
"What are you hiding?" The organizer shouted into the microphone, still barely audible over the din.
"What are you hiding?" The people in the owl masks were not needed to lead the chants after all. Everyone could feel deep in their bones, swelling inside of them, that it was time to chant.
"We want answers!"
"Answers!"
"We demand the truth!"
"The truth!"
"We demand not mere retribution, but justice!"
"Justice!"
The crowd roared. The glass of the shop windows rattled. Luna could not tell where her trembling body ended and the trembling mass of bodies around her began. She did not have words to describe how she felt, simultaneously ripped apart by pain and pushed down by the Ministry and lifted up by the crowd and turned inside out with anger and anguish and best of all, the fierce hope that came with knowing she was not alone in her anger and her anguish.
"Brothers and sisters, we stand together with our unanswered questions! The Ministry has failed us in so many ways. What questions do you demand answers for?"
The person in the dragon mask handed the microphone to someone standing near the front of the crowd. It passed from protestor to protestor, there for anyone who felt compelled to speak into it. Some of the same questions were asked over and over: How had the dead been killed? Was it painless? What proof did the Ministry have of Crouch's guilt? How had he even escaped from Azkaban in the first place? Were there other imposters at Hogwarts, even in the Ministry itself?
Others told stories that were painful in their searing singularity. One man who Luna realized must be Cedric Diggory's father demanded to know what had happened to his son's body. The Ministry told him his son was dead, but the body had never been returned to him, and no one would tell him anything. Like Ginny, many people who had been at the tournament had new scars and injuries they had no memory of receiving. Several people could only sob into the microphone before passing it on. Some, like Madam Bones, let the microphone pass them by entirely.
When the microphone came to her, Luna held it in silence for several seconds while she collected her thoughts. She was still heartbroken, but she was also energized. Her anger was a raw, potent force, and she realized that it was what had been missing from her parents' protests, which had been indignant without being truly angry. Think what could be accomplished if this anger could be sustained, directed!
"I don't have any questions about the massacre that haven't already been asked. But I have some more questions for Fudge and the Ministry. Why did you veto the Merpeople Habitat Protection Act? Why, as we speak, are merpeople being trapped in nets and forced out of their home waters? Why have you cut social services programs for Squibs and Muggleborns? What happened to the centaurs who were tranquilized and detained last year for protesting their treatment by the Ministry?"
There were murmurs in the crowd. Luna had no idea if they resented her for hijacking their protest or if they agreed with her. Perhaps they doubted her, if it was the first they had been hearing of these issues, for Luna knew that not everyone had heard about them since the cradle. But she pushed on.
"If it can happen to them, it can happen to any of us. If you threaten one of us, you threaten all of us. If you lie to one of us, you lie to all of us. None of us is safe until we all are!"
There were cheers and even more angry jostling of signs, so Luna thought it had gone over quite well. The golden microphone made several more rounds through the crowd, and people raised more and more grievances with the Ministry. A Muggleborn whose wand had been confiscated and never returned. A mother whose son had been arrested but never received a trial, and it had been years since she heard from him. Someone who had freed their own house elves only to have the Ministry fine them and forcibly remove the house elves, never to be heard from again. Luna had spent her entire life painfully aware of the injustices of the world, but even she felt burdened with the weight of her new knowledge of others' injustices and pain.
The person in the dragon mask asked them all to bow their heads and have a moment of silence for all those who had been lost, and all those the Ministry was doing their best to destroy. And then it was all over; Luna had no idea if it had lasted minutes or hours. But the protest did not end with a resigned pint in the pub. All the shyness and embarrassment was gone. People milled about and talked about future protests. Protestors who had never met before had cried together, shouted together, and were now conspiring together.
The organizer stepped from the crates and weaved their way through the dispersing crowd. Luna watched the green iridescent mask approach them. It nodded once at her and the rest of the Circle, most of the owls having returned to the nest by now.
"You're the lasses from Devon?" without the microphone distorting their voice, they had a lilting Welsh accent. Luna thought it sounded like a woman's voice, although it was deep and husky.
They nodded. Ginny opened her mouth to speak but the dragon shook their head.
"Not here. Follow me, but be sure to leave a little distance."
They wove through several alleys and ducked behind a skip which concealed an old metal door with chipped paint. It led to an abandoned warehouse. The air smelled of stale bread, rotten fruit, rusted metal, and damp paper. There were a few ramshackle tables tucked into corners, and Luna saw a stack of the owl masks the others had worn.
The figure in the dragon mask stood in the middle of the room. They looked around several times and muttered a few incantations.
"We should be alright now," they said, and pulled off the mask. She did appear to be a woman, with dark skin and tight curls in a short, sensible crop. Ginny stiffened beside Luna, her mouth gaping like a fish.
"Oh my God. You're...you're…"
The woman chuckled.
"Shh, we might not be quite that safe. I just wanted to thank you for helping to organize the protest. The turnout was better than I expected. You owls did a great job keeping everyone organized, and I loved your speech in particular," she nodded at Luna.
"T-thanks," Luna stammered. Ginny had shut her mouth but was now gripping Luna's sleeve.
"I've been using this as my safehouse when I've been planning. I wanted to show you, so we can all use it when we're planning our next action."
"You think people really want to keep on?" Cressida said.
"It certainly seemed so to me! But the sooner we can get something organized, the better. We'll want to act fast, while people are still energized, before they get apathetic."
They left after making plans to correspond further. Once they were back at the Circle, Ginny was nearly bouncing off the walls with excitement.
"Okay, okay, I'll humor you. So you know who she is?" Luna asked her. She could still feel the rush of blood in her ears and hear the shouts as if the protest was mere feet away instead of miles and miles.
"Know who she is? Of course I know who she is! That was Gwenog Jones."
Luna stared at her blankly, and Lavender only shrugged.
"Gwenog Jones? From the Holyhead Harpies? Only the best Quidditch player in the world? Merlin, sometimes I feel like I'm living with a bunch of Muggles."
"Wow, so she's a celebrity. No wonder she was so secretive," Lavender said with some admiration.
"A professional Quidditch player leading a protest against the Ministry? The world has become a very strange place," Cressida mused.
"Strange, but good at least," Luna reflected, "I'll take this over another fiasco any day."
The others agreed, and they spent the rest of the night speculating over who else might have been concealed behind the other masks.
The August mornings grew chiller and damper, each day feeling more and more tinged with the autumn to come. It had officially been over two months since anyone had heard from Xenophilius, and Luna was beginning to panic. He had planned a summer trip, and the reasonable explanations for her father's protracted absence were shriveling away with the last weeks of summer.
There was nothing to be done, even if they had trusted the Ministry enough to report him missing. After all, there was no real proof that he was missing. The trip had been planned, and Xeno Lovegood was notoriously flighty - it was not like he had truly disappeared out of thin air. You couldn't go searching for a man solely because he was a negligent correspondent. Matters were further complicated because his itinerary, if it could be called one, had been so vague and meandering.
Instead Luna had settled for scouring her father's letters and research notes for any mention of people he planned to visit on his sojourns. She wrote over a dozen letters and had already received several replies. Most wrote back to say that they had not seen Xenophilius, or that he had paid them a visit weeks or months ago. The most promising leads, one in Germany and one in Croatia, where he might have stopped en route to Albania, still had not written back.
Luna spent nearly all her free time at the Rook doing research, because it made her feel closer to her father. She flitted from topic to topic and book to book like a pollinating bee. One minute it was hallows research, the next it was trying to figure out how the Ministry might know about her prophecies, the next it was chipping away at the list of rabbit holes she had started compiling with her dad. Luna was still a slow reader and it still took time for the letters on the page to stop swimming in a soup of jagged lines and loopy strokes and resolve themselves into words. She smiled when she remembered her early reading lessons with Xenophilius, when she tried to eat the paper.
She was neck-deep in a rabbit hole one day when there were several sharp raps on the front door. This was odd. No one knocked when coming to the Rook unless they were strangers, and strangers were very rare these days.
"Daddy?" she murmured. The inkwell she was holding dropped to the floor and shattered.
She flew down the stairs, nearly tripping on the threadbare mat in her rush to open the door.
"Daddy?"
It was Narcissa Malfoy. She wore a deep emerald cloak with the velvet hood hanging low over her eyes, but Luna would recognize that imperious nose and pointed jaw anywhere. On more than one occasion it had occurred to Luna that her aunt looked like someone tried to mould a model of her mother's face but not quite got it right.
"What are you doing here?" she demanded, still breathless from the quick flash of hope and even quicker stab of disappointment.
"I need your help," Narcissa's voice was barely a whisper.
"Help? Ha! Why should I help you?"
"It's Draco. Please…"
"You mean my cousin who's made my life a living hell? Who made me eat literal dirt?" Luna was already shutting the door in her aunt's face when Narcissa spoke again.
"I suppose you don't need a spy in the Dark Lord's inner circle, then?"
Luna stopped. The door was still half-closed, Narcissa's face a mere sliver of puffy eyes and moon-pale skin.
"You mean...is he really back?"
"Oh, yes. And it's worse than you could possibly imagine."
AN: Thanks for reading! We're now officially into book 5 in the canon timeline - this is where things start majorly diverging in terms of when things happen, who knows what, where people are, etc. Most of these things have an in LLFC-universe reason for diverging, but not all of them will be explained. Basically assume that anything that would be considered a continuity or factual error in a more canon-compliant fic is intentional :)
We're about to get into some really interesting stuff and the end is in sight - I'm so excited! As always, comments are super appreciated and keep me motivated.
